The final round of the 2014 CEDA National Tournament. The participants
in this round are: Rashid Campbell and George Lee from Oklahoma vs.
Korey Johnson and Ameena Ruffin from Towson.
Panel: Allen, Ben
Kozak, Christopher Vincent, Christopher Denney, Ashley Bausch, Michael
Mendenhall, Beth Johnson, Willie Hallinan, Blake Montee, Andy Cooper,
Deven Short, Eric
The 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association's national championship
was held at Indiana University. The all African American female team
from Towson University defeated the all African American male team from
the University of Oklahoma. Though this my be a first for African
American women, it is not a real win for women or African Americans, but
a loss for collegiate debate specifically and America in general. I am
not sure what the winners won, but it certainly wasn't a debate. In
fact, to enable this hallow victory, the very concept of debate was
thrown aside. In the name of political correctness and affirmative
action, we have destroyed college debate, simply to bestow a meaningless
trophy on students who demonstrate no actual debate skills. It would
be funny if it wasn't so sad. However it provides a shocking example
as to why America is a nation in decline.
This article seems to reflect both a lack of understanding modern of debate and of modern academia. The article as a whole seems thoroughly under-researched and I would question whether or not the author actually knows anything about the debate community. Perhaps the journalist should take a queue from the massive amounts of work it took Towson and OU to get to finals and go beyond a google search and 5 minutes of poorly clipped together (out of context) footage in terms of their research.
ReplyDeleteActually, the entire article does not even contain a reason as to why finals of CEDA this year would be less of a debate than any other debate; it is just a bunch of assertions strung together. Both sides argued an academically researched position. In fact, some of the clips shown are actually the debaters reading segments of books and articles written by academics (which the article conveniently neglected to mention). These debaters did not get here because of "political correctness and affirmative action." They got to this round by engaging in arduous amounts of research and by defeating other teams.
This is very clearly a legitimate debate. If the issue is that they are talking quickly, then you should know everybody in debate does that. If the issue is that they are talking about racism, then heads up racism exists and is a topic that should be talked about. There is an entire academic field devoted to the study of racism.
It is fine to disagree with their argument -- that is the purpose of debate. However, the position that these debaters have "no actual debate skills" is untenable and frankly racist. White people read arguments all the time that would not be considered traditional by the author's standards; however, there has never been this much media backlash to any of those white teams.
This article is just one more example in a long line of thinly cloaked acts of white supremacism. Sure the author did not make a comment directly attacking black people, but they may as well have. The author's final assertion that this is "why America is a nation in decline" is very revealing. This article is just one more example of fear mongering minorities. Believe it or not well-educated college students who use their free time to participate in academic activities have a lot more to contribute to the world than self-proclaimed "conspiracy researchers" do.
It is easy to show a lot of clips out of context but I if anyone is interested I would encourage them to watch the actual round: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFbQftMe6qY
Towson's first speech starts around 1:03:30
finally a person (probably debater) who knows what they're taking about.
DeleteNo thanks I have heard enough uhs for a lifetime.
ReplyDeleteInteresting how this comment still doesn't contain a single reason or warrant as to why that would be uneducational.
ReplyDelete